by ravikiran perumalla

Month: May 2015

Micro Services are the next big thing in the modern software architecture and development. The distributed applications in the recent past changed the world of software outlook. Now the applications are developed, used, work and built differently. This caused the logical evolution of Micro Services. Some best examples of game changers in the software world are Git ( Distributed source control), Cloud computing (AWS, Azure, …), BitCoin (Distributed virtual currency).

Let’s begin our journey with understanding, What are Micro Services?

The Philosophy

The whole idea of Micro Service architecture is that they are small, focused and should be scaled.

The Definition

“ The MicroService architectural style is an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API. These services are built around business capabilities and independently deployable by fully automated deployment machinery. There is a bare minimum centralized management of these services, which may be written in different programming languages and use different data storage technologies.” – Fowler & Lewis, 2014.

This idea looks very similar to SOA. When I first heard about Micro Services, I thought they are just web Services and got many questions related to them. Some of them are as below
Why these services are called Micro Services?
What is the difference between these micro services and web Services ?
How different this world is different from SOA world?

Characteristics of Micro Service:

Do One thing well : Services should hide, how they work and do a single thing and do it well. The encapsulation is based on the business function of the service that it encapsulates the functional requirements.

Business Domain Centric : Each Service should align to the context with in the domain model for this to make sense in the domain and in the service architecture.

Decentralization : Every service should be decentralized and autonomous, so that each service can operate on its own schedule and priorities. Each service can be updated and deployed as fit.

Smart Endpoints and dumb pipes: This characteristic has come based on SOA, in SOA we have many products / ESB where we can define lot of logic in routing and transforming etc. Where as in Micro services the focus on login inside the service and the communication should happen very dumb like a REST / HTTP resource call to get to the service.

Fail-Safe : Enterprise systems need to be smart, in that they fail in a way that doesn’t break things in unpredictable ways. Anticipate failure in everything, among with validation of input and validation of data we send downstream.

Automation : Services should use automation which keeps management and operational support efficient. Employing large number of small services can become a mess if you do not embrace automation.

The regular Web services are definitely different from Micro services. The regular web services support is based on protocols like HTTP / SOAP. These services are invented to solve the integration problems between application when we have polyglot technologies with different vendors/ applications. So, the aim of web services is to integrate or build a channel to communicate between these applications. Where as Micro services aim is NOT to integrate applications, perhaps to reduce the complexity of a monolithic application to micro services. This would give us re-use, maintainability, test-ability, scalability etc in the application.

Micro Services Vs SOA:

SOA started with very similar characteristics mentioned above, but the idea got converted when many vendors started introducing new features to SOA. Then we have a vendor lock-in problem now. We have lot of logic built in around the services NOT inside the services. So, Micro services are the out come of learning of SOA. Still, micro services are evolving. We might end up with very similar problems of SOA, if we are not cautious. Hope we would be able to use micro services the way they are explained.